Oustand* (for Outstanding)

You might say that eradicating typos is a cause near and dear to our hearts. But for outstanding dedication, there are the guys who spent two and a half months traveling around the United States to do battle with spelling and punctuation errors (think gratuitous quotation marks and possessive apostrophes) on signs large and small. Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson document their exploits with Sharpies, crayons, and other implements in their new book The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (Crown, 2010). You can also check out their story at the NPR Web site.

Oustand* is a moderate-probability typo with 12 entries in the OhioLINK database. Join the fight by correcting this pesky error in your own catalog!

(Sharpies, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak